France, officially French Republic, French France or République Française, country of northwestern Europe. Historically and culturally among the most important nations in the Western world, France has also played a highly significant role in international affairs, with former colonies in every corner of the globe. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Alps and the Pyrenees, France has long provided a geographic, economic, and linguistic bridge joining northern and southern Europe. It is Europe’s most important agricultural producer and one of the world’s leading industrial powers.

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The château of Villandry, built in 1532, and its formal gardens in the Loire valley just east …

France is among the globe’s oldest nations, the product of an alliance of duchies and principalities under a single ruler in the Middle Ages. Today, as in that era, central authority is vested in the state, even though a measure of autonomy has been granted to the country’s régions in recent decades. The French people look to the state as the primary guardian of liberty, and the state in turn provides a generous program of amenities for its citizens, from free education to health care and pension plans. Even so, this centralist tendency is often at odds with another long-standing theme of the French nation: the insistence on the supremacy of the individual. On this matter historian Jules Michelet remarked, “England is an empire, Germany is a nation, a race, France is a person.” Statesman Charles de Gaulle, too, famously complained, “Only peril can bring the French together. One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 kinds of cheese.”

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This tendency toward individualism joins with a pluralist outlook and a great interest in the larger world. Even though its imperialist stage was driven by the impulse to civilize that world according to French standards (la mission civilisatrice), the French still note approvingly the words of writer Gustave Flaubert:

I am no more modern than I am ancient, no more French than Chinese; and the idea of la patrie, the fatherland—that is, the obligation to live on a bit of earth coloured red or blue on a map, and to detest the other bits coloured green or black—has always seemed to me narrow, restricted, and ferociously stupid.

At once universal and particular, French culture has spread far and greatly influenced the development of art and science, particularly anthropology, philosophy, and sociology.

France has also been influential in government and civil affairs, giving the world important democratic ideals in the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and inspiring the growth of reformist and even revolutionary movements for generations. The present Fifth Republic has, however, enjoyed notable stability since its promulgation on September 28, 1958, marked by a tremendous growth in private initiative and the rise of centrist politics. Although France has engaged in long-running disputes with other European powers (and, from time to time, with the United States, its longtime ally), it emerged as a leading member in the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. From 1966 to 1995 France did not participate in the integrated military structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), retaining full control over its own air, ground, and naval forces; beginning in 1995, however, France was represented on the NATO Military Committee, and in 2009 French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that the country would rejoin the organization’s military command. As one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—together with the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and China—France has the right to veto decisions put to the council.

The capital and by far the most important city of France is Paris, one of the world’s preeminent cultural and commercial centres. A majestic city known as the ville lumière, or “city of light,” Paris has often been remade, most famously in the mid-19th century under the command of Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussman, who was committed to Napoleon III’s vision of a modern city free of the choleric swamps and congested alleys of old, with broad avenues and a regular plan. Paris is now a sprawling metropolis, one of Europe’s largest conurbations, but its historic heart can still be traversed in an evening’s walk. Confident that their city stood at the very centre of the world, Parisians were once given to referring to their country as having two parts, Paris and le désert, the wasteland beyond it. Metropolitan Paris has now extended far beyond its ancient suburbs into the countryside, however, and nearly every French town and village now numbers a retiree or two driven from the city by the high cost of living, so that, in a sense, Paris has come to embrace the desert and the desert Paris.

Among France’s other major cities are Lyon, located along an ancient Rhône valley trade route linking the North Sea and the Mediterranean; Marseille, a multiethnic port on the Mediterranean founded as an entrepôt for Greek and Carthaginian traders in the 6th century bce; Nantes, an industrial centre and deepwater harbour along the Atlantic coast; and Bordeaux, located in southwestern France along the Garonne River.

Land

France lies near the western end of the great Eurasian landmass, largely between latitudes 42° and 51° N. Roughly hexagonal in outline, its continental territory is bordered on the northeast by Belgium and Luxembourg, on the east by Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, on the south by the Mediterranean Sea, Spain, and Andorra, on the west by the Bay of Biscay, and on the northwest by the English Channel (La Manche). To the north, France faces southeastern England across the narrow Strait of Dover (Pas de Calais). Monaco is an independent enclave on the south coast, while the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean is treated as an integral part of the country.

Château Gaillard, a 12th-century castle, overlooks the Seine River in the Normandy region of …

Relief

The French landscape, for the most part, is composed of relatively low-lying plains, plateaus, and older mountain blocks, or massifs. This pattern clearly predominates over that of the younger, high ranges, such as the Alps and the Pyrenees. The diversity of the land is typical of Continental Europe.

Three main geologic regions are distinguishable: the skeletal remains of ancient mountains that make up the Hercynian massifs; the northern and western plains; and the higher young fold mountains in the south and southeast, including the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their attendant narrow plains. Much of the detailed relief can be attributed geologically to the varying differences in the resistance of rocks to erosion. A great deal of the present landscape detail is due to glaciation during the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago). France lay outside the range of the great ice sheets that descended upon the northern part of Europe, so the direct sculpting of the land by ice was restricted to the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Vosges, Corsica, and the highest summits of the Massif Central. Just outside these glacial areas, in what are known as periglacial lands, repeated freezing and thawing of unprotected surfaces modified slopes by the movement of waste sheets (formed of shattered bedrock), producing very much the landscape that exists today. Pleistocene periglacial action generated the sheets of the fine windblown limon, or loess, that is the basis of the most fertile lowland soils, and it possibly also created the Landes, a sandy plain in southwestern France. The development of river terraces (flat, raised surfaces alongside valleys) was another characteristic of periglacial action.

Aerial view of the French Alps.

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The Hercynian massifs

The physical structure of France is dominated by a group of ancient mountains in the shape of a gigantic V, the sides of which form the two branches of Hercynian folding that took place between 345 and 225 million years ago. The eastern branch comprises the Ardennes, the Vosges, and the eastern part of the Massif Central, while the Hercynian massifs to the west comprise the western part of the Massif Central and the Massif Armoricain.

These highlands are composed of resistant metamorphic, crystalline, and sedimentary rocks from the Paleozoic Era (about 540 to 250 million years ago), the last including coal deposits. They share the common characteristic of repeated planation, or flattening. Some variety is provided by subsequent deformation and faulting, such as in the ridge-and-valley areas of the Massif Armoricain, where upland surfaces are deeply carved by valleys in dramatic fashion.

The Ardennes

The Ardennes massif is an extension, from Belgium into France, of the great Rhine Uplands, characterized by rocks of slate and quartz from the Paleozoic Era. Differential erosion of Paleozoic rocks has produced long ridges alternating with open valleys crossed by the Sambre and Meuse rivers.

The Vosges

The Alpine earth movements produced a great upswelling along the line of the present upper Rhine, leaving the Vosges with steep eastern slopes that descend to a rift valley containing the plains of Alsace and Baden; on the west the upland descends rather gently into the scarplands of Lorraine. The Vosges reaches its maximum elevation in the south, near the Alps, where crystalline rocks are exposed; the highest summits are called ballons, and the highest is the Ballon de Guebwiller (Mount Guebwiller), with an elevation of 4,669 feet (1,423 metres). To the north the Vosges massif dips beneath a cover of forested sandstone from the Triassic Period (about 250 to 200 million years ago).

The Massif Central

The vast plateau of the Massif Central covers about 33,000 square miles (86,000 square km), or some one-sixth of the area of the country. The Massif Central borders the Rhône-Saône valley on the east, the Languedoc lowlands on the south, the Aquitaine Basin on the southwest, and the Paris Basin on the north. The planation that occurred following the creation of the Hercynian belt removed the ancient mountain chains, but the block was uplifted under the impact of the Alpine mountain-building movements, with a steep descent on the east and southeast, nearest the Alps, and a gentle decline under the later sediments of the Aquitaine Basin to the west and the Paris Basin to the north. Much of the western massif, notably Limousin, consists of monotonous erosion surfaces. The centre and eastern parts of the massif were much fractured in the course of the Alpine movements, leaving behind upthrust blocks, of which the most conspicuous is the Morvan, the forested bastion of the northeastern corner of the massif. Downfaulted basins filled with sediments from Paleogene and Neogene times (i.e., about 65 to 2.6 million years ago), such as the Limagne near the city of Clermont-Ferrand in south-central France, were also formed. Faulting was associated with volcanic activity, which in the central part of the region formed the vast and complex structures of the massifs of Cantal and Monts Dore, where the Sancy Hill (Puy de Sancy), at 6,184 feet (1,885 metres), is the highest summit of the Massif Central. Farther west, on the fringe of the Limagne, is the extraordinary Chaîne des Puys, whose numerous cinder cones were formed only about 10,000 years ago and still retain the newness of their craters, lava flows, and other volcanic features. Numerous mineral springs, such as those at Vichy in the central Auvergne region, are a relic of volcanic activity.

Cinder cones of the Chaîne des Puys in the Massif Central, France.

Christian Kempf from TSW—CLICK/Chicago

The eastern and southern portions of the massif, from the Morvan through the Cévennes to the final southwestern termination of the massif in the Noire Mountains (Montagne Noire), are marked by a series of hill masses that overlook the lowlands of the Rhône-Saône river valley and the région of Languedoc-Roussillon; at least one of these uplands, Beaujolais, has become famous for the grapevines grown at its foot. Between the hill masses lie infolded coal deposits at locations such as Alès, Decazeville, Saint-Étienne, and Blanzy (Le Creusot) that are of more historical than contemporary importance. To the southwest the rocks of the massif are overlain by a great thickness of limestones (causses) from the Jurassic Period (about 200 to 145 million years ago). Lacking in surface water and little populated, this portion of the massif is crossed by rivers that trench dramatic gorges, notably that of the Tarn. Extensive cave systems bear remains of prehistoric art, such as that of Pêche-Merle in the Lot valley and the Lascaux Grotto in the Vézère valley.

The Massif Armoricain

The Massif Armoricain is contained mostly within the région of Brittany (Bretagne), a peninsula washed by the Bay of Biscay on the south and the English Channel on the north. The massif continues beyond Brittany eastward and across the Loire to the south. It is much lower than the other Hercynian massif; its highest point, the Mont des Avaloirs, on the eastern edge of the massif, attains an elevation of 1,368 feet (417 metres). Alternating bands of Paleozoic sediments and granitic rocks give the massif a generally east-west grain, particularly expressed in the headlands and bays of its rugged coast.

The great lowlands

The Paris Basin

Between the Ardennes, the Vosges, the Massif Central, and the Massif Armoricain lie the sedimentary beds that make up the Paris Basin. Alternating beds of limestones, sands, and clays dip toward the central Paris Basin, their outcrops forming concentric patterns. Especially to the east, erosion has left the more resistant rocks, usually limestones, with a steep, outward-facing scarp edge and a gentler slope toward the centre of the basin. The central Paris Basin is filled by rocks from the Paleogene and Neogene periods, mostly limestones, that form the level plateaus of regions such as Beauce, Brie, Île-de-France, Valois, and Soissonnais. This area is mostly covered with windblown limon, which is the basis of an excellent loamy soil. The limestone levels overlap in sandwich formation. Eroded remnants of higher formations have been left behind as isolated hills called buttes, perhaps the most famous of which is in Paris—the Butte de Montmartre, on which is one of the city’s most famous districts. Sandy areas adjoining the limestone formations bear forests, such as the Forest of Fontainebleau, southwest of Paris. In the east, in the regions of Lorraine and Burgundy, are Triassic and Jurassic rocks; among the scarps the Moselle Hills are noted for their minette, low-grade iron ore. In the extreme southeast the Jurassic limestone Plateau de Langres forms the watershed between the Seine and Rhône-Saône river systems; it is crossed by major routes linking Paris with the south. The eastern basin includes the chalk country of Champagne and the Argonne massif. In the western part of the Paris Basin, scarps in the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks of Normandy are not prominent. The chalk plateau is trenched by the lower Seine in a course marked by spectacular meanders and river cliffs. The plateau surfaces are frequently mantled by clay-with-flints and other residual deposits, producing heavy soils with much forest, grassland, and orchard cultivation. Farther north the wide chalk plateaus of Picardy and Artois are generally covered with limon, which provides for a rich agriculture; many stretches of magnificent white chalk cliffs line the English Channel coast.

The Flanders Plain

In the extreme north the French boundary includes a small part of the Anglo-Belgian basin. Coastal sand dunes protect the reclaimed marshes of French Flanders from invasion by the sea.

Situated in northwestern Europe, France has historically and culturally been among the most important countries in the Western world. Former French colonies in every corner of the globe attest to the country’s stature in world affairs. The French language ranks second only to English in international use, and French culture has spread far and greatly influenced the development of art and science, particularly anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. France is Europe’s most important agricultural producer, providing wheat, wine, and other food products to the world, and the counry is also an industrial power. The capital, Paris, is a preeminent cultural and commercial center. Area 210,026 square miles (543,965 square kilometers). Population (2016 est.) 64,641,000.

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